A Meditation on Birds and Other Things After Watching It Was Just an Accident
I know very little about Iran, and yet there are familiar crow sounds in the beginning of the movie where cars dart on busy roads and one man digs a dusty grave in the desert. Nothing feels safe there. Crows squawk a leathery harshness, anger even in their murderous voices. I do like their sleek, shiny bodies, the silhouette they always are. They seem like omens. Does every bird mean something? The dove whose wings Noah and his wife finally spied gliding in the sky, and why is the wife never named? I remember years ago losing my maiden name on the checks. How incensed I was, calling Bank of America and ordering more stacks with all three names. Is it about adding? I am counting days and months and years, hoping they keep coming. I don’t like seeing the last of anything. That huge shaker of cinnamon diminishing to dust. At the end of the movie, when the good people have an opportunity to be terrible, they resist. And there are no crows. Only fluted melody—maybe larks or thrushes. A nightingale? That constant figure in Persian poetry, a conduit to the gods. At the memory care facility where my mother-in-law moved into elsewhere, there was a white parakeet for the residents. At night a dark cloth covered the cage. No liquid moon. No branch or tree for rest. No nest. No other bird to flit against. Birds make me look up. When you see only sky, everyday things—dishes in the sink, unopened bills, stitches healing—become smaller. No shadows up there. Though I didn’t see them, I heard the music of bellbirds as I hiked in the steepness of New Zealand. They made me remember the way I’d start singing to chase away fear, barreling down a hill on my bike. How sweet sound can pull us to safety.
Mini-interview with Sarah Dickenson Snyder
HFR: Can you share a moment that has shaped you as a writer (or continues to)?
SDS: The act of writing began in kindergarten with Mrs. Stewart; how I Ioved forming letters in my own word book. I still love handwriting. My work always starts in a journal with an extra fine tip pen.
HFR: What are you reading?
SDS: The Loneliness of Sonia and Sonny by Kiran Desai is amazing. And I can’t wait to read Kelli Russell Agodon’s new book, Accidental Devotions.
HFR: Can you tell us what prompted “A Meditation on Birds and Other Things After Watching It Was Just an Accident”?
SDS: The combination of having taken a workshop online with Rick Barot on prose poems and having watched the compelling film, It Was Just an Accident, that kept sticking in my head pulled me to the page.
HFR: What’s next? What are you working on?
SDS: I just had my fifth book, To Eve, a book-length poem, published. I have been in a space with Eve for four years, and this poem that you accepted feels like a movement in another direction. Maybe I am diving into prose poems …
HFR: Take the floor. Be political. Be fanatical. Be anything. What do you want to share?
SDS: Feeling gratitude seems like the antidote to any pull toward darkness.
After years in the classroom, Sarah Dickenson Snyder now carves in stone, sculls on the Connecticut River, and rides her bike. Travel opens her eyes. She has five poetry collections: The Human Contract (2017), Notes from a Nomad (nominated for the Massachusetts Book Awards 2018), With a Polaroid Camera (2019), Now These Three Remain (nominated for the Massachusetts Book Awards 2023), and To Eve (Nixes Mate Review 2026). Several poems have been nominated for Best of Net and Pushcart Prizes. Work is in Rattle, Verse Daily, and RHINO. More: sarahdickensonsnyder.com.
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Heavy Feather Review 